Google DeepMind WaveNet Mimics Human Speech

Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division DeepMind has figured out how to make computers generate speech which sounds natural by mimicking human speech. To do this DeepMind created WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. Put into simple terms, WaveNet uses an artificial neural network, which attempts to mimic how the human brain disseminates information, to focus on the construction of sound waves in their raw waveforms and tries to model likely patterns in how they produce natural speech. Through this process WaveNet learns how to synthesise speech as well as other audio signals such as music. It differs from common text-to-speech system, which form sentences from large databases of short speech fragments and assemble them into sentences, resulting in speech that sounds classically robotic and stilted. “[Text-to-speech] makes…